The Mexican opposition faces a political coup towards the 2024 presidential elections, after the guilty verdict for drug trafficking in the United States of the former Secretary of Public Security (2006-2012), Genaro García Luna, which strengthens the narrative of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador .
“Due to a matter of a judicial nature, the Mexican opposition, the opposition to the government of President López Obrador, suffers an electoral political setback,” political analyst Edgar Ortiz-Arellano told EFE.
The specialist stressed that the right-wing National Action Party (PAN), which García Luna served, is the one that comes out “with the greatest damage and negative repercussions”, since the case “speaks of the fact that the The last government that the PAN had was impregnated with deep corruption in the security area.
In this sense, he said that this judicial result against the former official of former President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) “is consistent with the narrative of President López Obrador,” who places this former president as his main political adversary after losing to him in the 2006 elections.
Ortiz-Arellano noted that the opposition will have to reconfigure its political strategy for distance himself from former President Calderónespecially the PAN, since it considered that it is probably “no longer the party that will lead the 2024 presidential election.”
“Perhaps (the opposition) would have to rethink, depending on the (local) electoral results of 2023, whether the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is the one to take the opposition candidate for the presidency,” he added.
Corruption as a campaign promise in 2024
Political consultant Fernando Dworak explained to EFE that the fight against corruption has been a central promise of political campaigns in recent years in Mexico.
Therefore, it coincided that the situation of the trial of García Luna benefits the narrative of López Obrador, who since 2018, when he ascended to the presidency, accused the opposition of being “morally defeated.”
“So it is not only the issue of Genaro García Luna, but how the situation of García Luna contributes to strengthening a narrative of a opposition morally defeated, discreditedwho was never able to fight corruption,” he warned.
Will the opposition disappear after the trial of García Luna?
Despite the coup, analysts agreed that the opposition alliance of the PAN, PRI and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) will persist to confront the ruling National Regeneration Movement (Morena).
“It will not fade because the elections are a matter of numbers and, under the current conditions, no opposition party alone could be a real option against Morena,” said Ortiz-Arellano.
Ángel Gustavo López, a political analyst at the School of Social Sciences and Government at Tec de Monterrey, also stated that the opposition alliance will not set aside the PANalthough he considered that they would have to separate themselves completely from Calderón and García Luna.
“They should raise the issue in the sense that García Luna did things aloneas shown at trial, and raise the idea that Calderón is held accountable, to clarifyso that they do not have that stain ”, he argued.
Opposition must change narrative by 2024
Dworak also said that a kind of complicity will hang over the PRI and the PRD, “whether they make an alliance or not because for the president’s (López Obrador) speech it is that all the traditional political class are the same, they are all a mafia and Morena is different ”.
In this sense, he considered that the opposition should take fund actionscarry out a self-criticism and promote a rotation of political cadres.
“But it seems that it is the same people who lost in 2018 who want us to believe that they are going to win in 2024,” he warned.
A matter that does not end
Meanwhile, the president of Mexico asked to clarify the role of former presidents Vicente Fox (2000-2006) and Calderón, as well as that of the United States authorities in this case.
“(Calderón should explain) how he appointed García Luna and sustained him for six years, and whether or not he knew what García Luna was doing, and the government-to-government ties between the United States and Mexico,” López Obrador remarked on Thursday.
Calderón has assured that “he never negotiated or agreed with criminals.”
For his part, the coordinator of the PAN deputies, Jorge Romero, has assured that the party is “absolutely out of that”.